Obama stresses energy gains at end of tough week

After a week of being pounded over the troubled rollout of Obamacare, President Barack Obama is using his Saturday address to stress one piece of unambiguously good news: The U.S. is inching closer to controlling its own energy destiny.

“One area where we’ve made great progress is American energy,” Obama said in his weekly address to the nation Saturday. “After years of talk about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, we are actually poised to control our own energy future.”

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Obama pointed to this week’s announcement by the Energy Information Administration, the nonpartisan statistical arm of the Energy Department, that in October the U.S. produced more crude oil than it imported — the first time that has happened since February 1995.

Obama’s comments come just a day after his Environmental Protection Agency proposed scaling back a biofuels mandate that Congress created in 2005 as one of the supposed central tools in reducing U.S. oil imports. Among EPA’s reasons was that the tightened fuel efficiency requirements Obama has championed have lowered gasoline demand more than expected.

In the address, Obama praised those fuel efficiency gains for saving consumers money at the gasoline pump.

He also touted gains in wind and solar power and “initiatives to put people to work upgrading our homes, businesses, and factories so that they waste less energy.” He said his policies are curbing carbon pollution. “That’s good news for anyone who cares about the world we leave to our kids,” he said.

And he noted the U.S. produces “more natural gas than anyone –and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it.”

Critics of Obama’s energy agenda say the oil and gas boom has little to do with his policies, stressing that development on state and private land, rather than federal lands, is leading to the recent domestic production gains. And they fear that upcoming controls by the Bureau of Land Management and EPA on the use of hydraulic fracturing may slow down the shale gas boom.